The present invention relates to anatomical and functional modeling of coronary circulation, and more particularly, to multi-scale anatomical and functional modeling of coronary circulation for coronary artery disease diagnosis and intervention planning.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of deaths worldwide. Among various CVDs, coronary artery disease (CAD) accounts for nearly fifty percent of those deaths. Despite significant improvements in medical imaging and other diagnostic modalities, the increase in premature morbidity and mortality for CAD patients is still very high. One reason for this is the lack of accurate in-vivo and in-vitro patient-specific estimates for diagnosis and progression of the disease. For example, in the case of coronary stenosis, accurate estimates of the anatomy (i.e., the amount of narrowing in the coronary) as seen in diagnostic images can vastly underestimate or overestimate the severity of the blockage. For a functional assessment of such a blockage, it is important to incorporate multi-faceted information from the hemodynamics and cellular mechanisms from multiple scales. Incorporating such multi-scale information in a complex model has been difficult in the past due to high computational demands.